I am a former student and current staff member at The Walden School's Young Musicians Program. This is a camp for musicians aged 9-18 (including seniors who just graduated) who spend 5 weeks at a boarding school in rural Dublin, New Hampshire. It is the only camp in America which is dedicated primarily to writing music (as opposed to performing), but they gladly accept musicians who have never written a note in their life before as long as you are interested in learning how. Every morning students take a composition, music theory, and elective class (last year these included courses in electronic music, learning how to write a musical, medieval music, a course studying Beethoven's late quartets, puppet theater, and jazz band). Then everybody spends an hour singing in a chorus. Every week there are forums for students to have their works (works works-in-progress) performed, recorded, and then discussed by the audience. There are also free weekly concerts by professionals, mountain hikes, swim trips, dances, open mics, and many nights the entire camp gets together to learn some new songs (in other words, all kinds of cool summer camp activities). While all this is going around, students work with their teachers to write some kind of brand new composition. In the final week there are 3 nights in a row where we fly in professional musicians help premiere everybody's works, and a professional composer comes to moderate the audience discussions about the new pieces. Then, the chorus puts on a really awesome concert. It's an incredibly intense experience which I guarantee will change how you experience music, and it's always been the most fun part of my life.

I am posting here because the director just told me that there are some unfilled spots, and that even though the final deadline to apply was last month, they are looking for last minute additions and are still accepting applications on a rolling basis. I will not lie - it is very expensive ($7,800, although there might still be financial aid. It covers 5 weeks of full room and board, buffet food, and extremely high level instructors). As much as I wish this weren't the case, it is, so I don't want to mislead anybody here. However, I know enough quizbowlers to know that somebody reading this website is probably a music supernerd who would have the time of their life here, so I wanted to make sure people knew about it. If you and your family think you might be interested in applying last-minute, you should absolutely check it out, or if not, definitely consider it for next year.

Here is the website - http://waldenschool.org/ - and here is their contact page - http://waldenschool.org/contact-us/The director's name is Seth Brenzel, his email is sbrenzel@waldenschool.org, he's one of the nicest people in the world and I guarantee if you shoot him an email he would love to talk to you further.The camp dates are July 1st through August 6th, and it is held on the campus of The Dublin School (Dublin, NH).

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